Authors: Sarah d'Almeida

the musketeer's seamstress (42 page)

Porthos’s thick fingers pulled and stroked frantically at his luxuriant red moustache. What was there to it? Only this. That the boy had been so intent, so decided, so capable of hard work, that Porthos refused to believe he would give up on his lesson so easily.

And because Porthos had made sure the child understood that he wouldn’t continue teaching him unless he showed for every lesson punctually, Guillaume would know that this one miss could mean the end of his apprenticeship.

The Porthos in the mirror looked triumphant, justified in his worry. And Porthos stomped. God’s Blood! So, the boy was late. And so, perhaps something had happened to him. What was Porthos to do to that? He was not the boy’s father.

And on this there was a sharp feeling of something that inarticulate Porthos would never find the words to describe. He had the sudden forlorn feeling that, had life been different—had his family lands not been poor and forsaken and inhabited by peasantry just as poor and forsaken; had his father known how to plant the land with newer, more fashionable crops—he would now be married and have half a dozen children clustering around him. The longing for that life that had never happened surprised him. He would have liked half a dozen broad shouldered sons, clustering around him, learning sword fighting and horseback riding from him, and admiring their father’s strength and courage.

He growled at the Porthos in the mirror, whose image was giving him these ideas and, removing his hat, flung it with force to the dusty stone floor of the room. Oh, curse it all. God’s death! What was he to do about this? And what did Guillaume have to do with these children that Porthos had never had and would probably never have?

What had he to do? The frowning, worried reflection seemed to tell Porthos that Porthos had enjoyed Guillaume’s company as if Guillaume were a replacement for those sons Porthos would never have. And the boy had responded to Porthos that way too. He’d listened to him with full attention and learned to repeat his movements faultlessly.

No. Nothing short of a major disaster would have prevented such a determined and cunning boy from coming to his lesson.

Slowly, Porthos picked up his hat and dusted its plume. The devil of it was that he had no idea at all where the boy came from. Oh, the child had told him his name, but D’Harcourt was not a name that Porthos knew. It must be the name of a family recently come to Paris from the provinces and probably renting lodgings meaner than Porthos’s own from some landlord, in some part of town. What part of town, only God himself knew. That is, if He had paid any attention to such an unimportant matter.

Porthos hadn’t bothered to find the family home because the child was clearly coming to his lessons in secret—but assiduously.

As a huge sigh escaped his lips, Porthos wondered how to track someone—how to find them and discover if a mishap had befallen them when you didn’t know where they were coming from or what their route was to get here?

He walked to the door and looked down at the garden, slumbering in the twilight heat of summer. Very well. So, he knew that the child came in through the garden gate at the back.

Without much thought, without much more than a need to move, a need to do something, Porthos walked impatiently down the garden path, past the kitchen garden with its parched-looking rows of herbs, and down, past an area where trees shaded the path, to the unpainted, rickety gate at the back that had been barely visible from the practice room’s door.

He opened the gate, satisfied at its shriek, and looked out at the broad plaza back there. Back here, truly, you wouldn’t know you were in Paris. This garden gate opened to a bucolic landscape—the back of several houses, narrow alleys running between the tall walls that encircled gardens.

There was a vague scent of roses in the air, and Porthos remembered that Guillaume had come in yesterday with a rose in his cap—a bright red rose with wide-spread petals, of the sort that often grew along the lanes of Porthos’s native village. Guillaume had said they were flowering just up the lane from here.

Like a dog on the trail, Porthos followed the strong scent of roses across the plaza. Peering down a lane, he saw a straggle of nearly wild roses pushing over the top of a rickety stone wall. The roses were exactly the same color and look as the one Guillaume had worn.

Convinced he at least knew the boy had come this way, Porthos trotted down the narrow alley. It was barely wide enough for his shoulders and it was hemmed in by two very long, very high walls, both of which, from the noise and talks emerging from beyond them, probably hid communal gardens shared by several rental houses or houses filled with rental rooms.

At the end of the alley, another alley ran across it, forming as if the top of a
T
. Porthos frowned. Right or left? If he went right, and the boy was coming in, late, from the left, he would miss him completely. And then Guillaume would wonder where Porthos had gone.

What had Guillaume said about his route here? What that might give Porthos a clue as to where the boy came from.

Vaguely, because he hadn’t been paying much attention, Porthos remembered that Guillaume had complained of the heat of a smithy he passed on the way here. It had been a couple of weeks ago, when August was at its hottest, the sun beating Paris to a red heat, as though it had been metal lying on Vulcan’s own forge.

And now straining his ears, Porthos could hear as if hammers on metal. From the right. He hastened down the right side of the alley, till he came to a busy forge. It took up the bottom space of a tall house, but it had at least three doors, all of them open to the day. There were anvils with sweating men pounding on them, and there were boys working frantically at the bellows, and there was a nobleman—from the attire—in a corner, holding a nervous white horse who was being shoed by two muscular young men.

Porthos bit at the corner of his moustache. So—there was a forge. Pray heaven it was the right one. Now . . . from here . . .

Something about a fishmonger’s. Just down the street. Porthos’s nose led again, till he came to a fishmonger’s in a huge plaza. From there so many roads led on that Porthos found himself quite at a loss. Until he remembered Guillaume admiring Porthos’s new boots and saying that he’d seen some at the cobbler’s on the way here, but that his father would never give him money for them.

Peering down the streets, Porthos found the cobbler’s. From there, he remembered the boy making some mention of a tavern at the end of an alley and how musketeers sometimes drank there. The boy hadn’t wanted to discuss the tavern much, but he’d told Porthos it was The Hangman.

From Porthos’s foggy memories of being led by Athos to every tavern in Paris, when Athos was in one of his drinking moods, Porthos found the alley that led to the back of The Hangman.

He walked down half the alley before he saw the boy. At first, he thought it was just a pile of clothes, though the clothes were purple velvet and the hat had a plume uncommonly like Guillaume’s. It was crumpled against a wall, on the muddy ground of the alley at the back of the tavern.

But when Porthos approached, his big feet raising dull echoes from the packed dirt, the bundle near the wall stirred, the hat went up, and a flushed, haggard face with bulging blue eyes stared at Porthos.

“Guillaume,” Porthos said. “What is wrong, boy?”

The boy looked at Porthos. His eyes were wide, and shiny but didn’t seem to see him. “The angels,” he said. “The angels flying.”

“Oh, here, boy. How much did you drink?” Porthos asked, feeling annoyed with Guillaume and with himself. It was clear the boy had got hold of wine somewhere. Clumsily, Porthos reached for the boy and tried to make him stand, but he only flopped around like an ill-stuffed rag doll.

Guillaume’s arms moved, outward. “Fying,” he said.

And here, Porthos was momentarily confused. The boy was flushed, and he acted drunk, but there was no smell of alcohol about him. Could he have gone mad? Or was he ill?

“Here,” Porthos said, trying to support the boy as he would one of his comrades when wounded or drunk.

But the boy twisted and convulsed and Porthos, despairing of getting a hold on him, finally pulled him up and threw him over his shoulder. He would take Guillaume back to his lodgings then call on Aramis. Aramis knew nearly anything and everyone. If the boy was sick, Aramis was the best person to find the boy’s family. Sick or mad, they would need to know.

Porthos hurried back towards his lodging at a semirun. The boy, thrown over his shoulder, talked constantly, but not of anything that Porthos could see. “Beautiful,” he’d say. “Angels. Flying. Flying. Birds. The sky is so blue.”

These words, as they walked through narrow, darkened alleys made the hair at the back of Porthos’s neck stand up. It was as if the boy were talking of some reality only he could see.

Suddenly he stopped and convulsed, then again. There was a sound like a surprised sigh.

It didn’t surprise Porthos when he put the boy down on the floor of the practice room to find the boy had died. Still he checked it, with a finger laid against the boy’s neck, a hand searching for a heartbeat that wasn’t there.

At long last, he stood and slowly removed his hat in respect for the small corpse with his wide-open eyes, his expression of surprise.

Guillaume D’Harcourt was dead. Who knew from what? Who knew how to contact his family? Who could break the news to them? And who could ensure the killer was found?

Athos, Aramis, D’Artagnan. The names of his friends, the other three of what all called the four inseparables, came unbidden to Porthos mind. He never doubted it.

Slamming the hat back down on his head, he left the practice room, closing the door gently behind him. Athos, noble as Scipio and twice as wise, Aramis, learned in theology and the labyrinthine ways of Parisian society, D’Artagnan the young, cunning Gascon would know how to help Porthos see justice for his apprentice.

Death of a Musketeer.

Here it must be allowed that Monsieur Dumas twisted truth, for he claimed that the musketeers had never seen the inside of Porthos’s home. This falsehood—fabricated to emphasize Porthos’s vanity and entertain Monsieur Dumas’s contemporaries—must be forgiven. Monsieur Dumas’s main purpose was, after all, to entertain. Now the D’Artagnan Diaries have given it the lie. It is noteworthy that even Dumas slipped, for on the occasion of the famous tennis match, he says the musketeers met at Porthos’s.

Other books

Paleo Cookbook For Dummies by Kellyann Petrucci

Vanishing Acts by Phillip Margolin, Ami Margolin Rome

Vampirates 4: Black Heart by Justin Somper

Traps by MacKenzie Bezos

Golden Hour by William Nicholson

Tip-Top Tappin' Mom! by Nancy Krulik

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist

Missing Pieces of My Forever-Heart by Janet Grosshandler

Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain

The Maestro's Apprentice by Rhonda Leigh Jones